How to Use ‘Alternative Health Practices’ Without Endangering Your Soul

BY JUDY ROBERTS

July 26-August 8, 2009 Issue |
Posted 7/17/09 at 9:01 AM

Growing up in
a family that ran a health-food business, Charlene Williams learned to eat well
and heal naturally.

Today the mother of four and
grandmother of four raises some of her own vegetables and fruits, shops at
farmers markets, and cooks from scratch. She also eats whole grains, avoids
processed foods and relies on vitamin and mineral supplements, herbs, herbal
teas, and home remedies like fresh-squeezed lemon and molasses in hot water for
colds and sore throats.

In addition, she goes to a
chiropractor and recently saw a naturopathic doctor and bioenergetics
practitioner for help with stress and lack of energy.

But, as a Catholic, Williams is
careful to avoid the New Age ideas and practices widely peddled in the
subculture that has grown up around natural foods and alternative health care —
whether it’s the crystals and books on transcendental meditation displayed in
some health-food stores, Reiki treatments offered by certain massage therapists
or yoga classes at the local gym.

Williams, whose grandparents started
Dietrich’s Natural Foods in their home in Toledo, Ohio, in the 1930s, told the
Register she doubts consumers interested in healthy living back then would have
encountered the unorthodox spiritual offerings ubiquitous in the industry
today.

“As the New Age became more common
in our society, I started to see in various health-food stores more things like
incense and crystals,” she says. “That kind of stuff was not around when I was
a kid.”

Reading about the New Age from a
Catholic perspective in books like Randy England’s The
Unicorn in the Sanctuary (Tan, 1990) alerted Williams to New Age and
Eastern religious practices within and outside the natural-healing movement,
helping her discern what is and isn’t healthy for the eternal soul.

Many times, she says, “It sounds
like it’s all good, [but] the problem is that the spiritual part isn’t in line
with Catholicism.”

Truer words have seldom been spoken.
For, although there is much to commend in many natural-healing approaches, any
practice or belief that draws from a newfangled spiritual source should raise
red flags for Catholics.

Eternity vs. Oblivion

The U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine recently issued guidelines for evaluating Reiki,
an alternative healing technique that attempts to correct imbalances in “life
energy” through the placement of the practitioner’s hands on certain parts of
the body. The bishops point out that the central elements of the worldview
suggested by Reiki theory belong neither to the Christian faith nor to natural
science.

Given this, they conclude, Catholics
who trust in Reiki are entering the realm of superstition, which “corrupts
one’s worship of God by turning one’s religious feeling and practice in a false
direction.”

Similarly, Father Mitch Pacwa,
Eternal Word Television Network host and author of Catholics
and the New Age: How Good People Are Being Drawn into Jungian Psychology, the
Enneagram, and the Age of Aquarius (Servant, 1992), cautions that
yoga, regarded by some as merely a form of exercise or relaxation, is in fact a
religious practice with a spiritual goal: making the personality cease to
exist. “That is incompatible with Christian goals,” Father Pacwa says. “As a
Catholic,” he adds, “my goal is not simply to have this state of mind. My goal
is union with Christ.”

During the 1970s, Father Pacwa says,
he tried practicing something called “Christian yoga” that involved meditating
on the words of Christ while assuming various yoga positions. But, he recalls,
“The problem still remained. I was trying to attain a certain state of
consciousness rather than personal union with Christ. I was not really
connecting with Christ.”

Father Pacwa says to be wary of
practitioners who claim to be able to balance or align chakras,
energy centers along the spinal column according to kundalini yoga. Through
meditation, kundalini yoga tries to awaken “the sleeping kundalini serpent” at
the base of the spine to increase enlightenment.

Practitioners who say they work with
chakras,
Father Pacwa explains, may be mixing and matching different Asian philosophies.
Besides failing to respect the integrity of and differences between each
philosophy, he says, they could be wading into dangerous territory. “If you
start opening up the chakras and don’t
know what you are doing,” he says, “you are opening up yourself to grave
danger, madness and even death. That’s according to practitioners of kundalini
yoga. It’s not my interpretation.”

On the other hand, Father Pacwa
says, he considers reflexology, which involves applying pressure to the feet
and hands, a harmless (if questionably effective) nonmedical therapy.

His
concern about alternative healing practices and methods in general is that
their medical claims are often unsubstantiated — and they are sometimes used as
a shill to draw people into New Age spirituality.

For example, he says, when a method
does not work, a practitioner may propose a spiritual solution like past-life
regression or the application of crystals to channel the universe’s energy.

“This nonsense,” he says, “will take
your soul to the other side. It’s entering enemy territory.”

God’s Good Earth

Rebecca Otto of Leipsic, Ohio, a
registered nurse and mother of six whose family’s health regimen includes
chiropractic care, vitamin supplements and visits to a naturopathic doctor,
says she is very much aware of the need to avoid anything that could become a
portal into areas of spiritual warfare.

“There are good and bad spirits, and
we don’t want to put ourselves in those areas,” she says, adding that she would
refrain from involvement in yoga, Reiki, acupuncture and crystals, for example.
“All I’ve had to hear is a few knowledgeable people on this,” she says. “There
are a few areas I don’t feel it’s worth risking my soul to venture into.”

Although Otto acknowledges that
there are times modern medicine is needed, her experience has shown that some
alternative forms of healing work.

One of her sons, for instance,
suffered from allergies to the point that he needed breathing treatments every
spring and fall. The naturopathic doctor who evaluated him recommended several
lifestyle changes and gave the boy a mixture of drops to take along with
natural herbs. Her son improved so much, Otto says, that he only needs an
occasional breathing treatment.

“God created nature, and he has
given us ways to help other than [traditional] medicine,” she says.

Maryann Marshall of Lawrenceville,
Ga., an herbalist who teaches online classes and has organized a Catholic
herbalists group on the Internet, says she has discovered that much of natural
healing was actually advanced by monks during the Middle Ages.

Marshall received much of her
knowledge about herbs from her Polish immigrant grandfather and, over the last
30 years, has added to what he taught her through her own research. In the
process, she has often run into New Age material, something she finds both
“distracting and distressing.”

As a result, she has learned not to
proceed without some kind of spiritual grounding. She always prays to the Holy
Spirit before doing any reading or studying and also consults a priest who is
her spiritual director.

There’s lots to benefit from in
natural foods and remedies, she says, but “you need a very, very, very firm
foundation in the Catholic faith.”